Traditionally, people who were separated by geographic distances and who desired to collaborate with each other in so-called “real time” had relatively few options. An expensive option included traveling to a common geographic location or place to meet, chat, share notes, and discuss ideas. A less expensive, but arguably less productive, option included participating in a telephone conference call and concurrently exchanging email messages.
However, companies are just beginning to fully realize that phone and e-mail are no longer the most efficient ways for communication in today's disperse organizations. Currently the market of collaboration consists of a variety of companies offering a variety of separate solutions. The capabilities of these known solutions include: presence, instant messaging, web conferencing and team or project workspaces. In the current market, vendors can only offer stand-alone products for each of these solutions. Solutions are generally limited in scope to address either asynchronous collaboration or synchronous collaboration. Known attempts to combine synchronous and asynchronous collaboration have provided awkward solutions because they require leaving one mode in order to act in the other mode.
A drawback of these solutions is that each is a separate application and the use of these software applications on a separate basis is cumbersome, complicated, and expensive. For example, in current workspace applications, more than one person can view a document in the same virtual environment, but these technologies only offer serial editing, allowing only a single individual to make edits to the document when that individual has that document open on his or her computer. As such, while collaborating in a serial editing environment, people are only allowed to edit one at a time. Each edit must be discussed over instant messaging or e-mail and collaborators must wait to make edits. Thus, in such systems, the permission to edit the document must be passed back and forth as if they were writing on the same piece of paper with one pen. Such techniques can result in ending that momentum that can come with successful collaboration sessions.
Another application commonly used for collaboration is E-mail. However, companies are finding that e-mail is overwhelming their organizations. Companies are complaining of losing hours of productivity a day to sorting through e-mail. Another example of a conventional collaboration tool is instant messaging (IM), otherwise referred to herein as chat. IM is typically implemented using peer-to-peer communications. Chat is a transit real-time or “live” activity in which interface activity is synchronously updated as the interaction progresses. Prior known attempts to combine synchronous IM-type tools with asynchronous collaboration tools, such as browser-based conferencing tools, have resulted in cumbersome products that often require users to leave one of the modes of communication to enter the other of the modes of communication.
Another example of a conventional collaboration tool is browser-based conferencing. Such on-line conferencing activity is typically a transient event. In some known systems, static recordings of the sessions are recorded for later replay. One drawback of such systems is the inability to provide features for continued collaboration, resuming collaboration, or sharing asynchronous collaboration on the same subject.
Concurrently using a number of stand-alone collaboration tools, such as combinations of one or more of the previously described tools and/or one or more other available tools, leads to inevitable problems. For example, compatibility problems and productivity losses are inevitable when using several separate stand-alone collaboration tools. Transferring information from one tool to another tool can often result in data files or edits being lost, permissions being incorrectly updated, and/or sessions or connections being dropped. Switching from one stand-alone application to another stand-alone application so that a collaboration can “move” from IM, to a browser-based conference, and to a shared workspace can waste valuable time and frustrate collaboration participants.
Therefore, it would be beneficial to provide improved systems and methods for collaboration, which for example can overcome the illustrative drawbacks of existing collaboration tools mentioned or provide new functionality to users.